Elon Musk became the world’s first trillionaire on Friday as SpaceX surged in its Nasdaq debut, with the largest initial public offering in history lifting the rocket and satellite company’s market value to $2.18 trillion.
In the first few minutes of trading on Friday, the company’s market cap pushed the Tesla chief executive’s fortune past a trillion dollars, a threshold no individual had reached.
Shares of SpaceX, trading under the ticker SPCX, opened at $150 — roughly 11% above the $135 offer price — and climbed as high as $168.75 before settling around $166.66 shortly before noon in New York, a gain of 23.45%.
The stock did not begin changing hands until around 11:46 a.m. in New York — nearly two hours after Shotwell’s opening bell, as pre-open indications ranged as high as $175 before settling lower.
In roughly its first 11 minutes about 138.6 million shares traded, equivalent to a quarter of the entire 555.56 million-share free float created by the offering.
SpaceX raised about $75 billion in the IPO, the largest in Wall Street history by a wide margin over Saudi Aramco’s 2019 listing.
President and chief operating officer Gwynne Shotwell rang the opening bell at the Nasdaq in New York while Musk marked the moment from the company’s Starbase headquarters in Texas.
“A little company that started in a warehouse in El Segundo is now going public with the largest IPO ever,” Musk said.
The Trillion-Dollar Math
Calculations by Forbes estimates put Musk’s net worth above $1.1 trillion once trading began — making him the first person in history with a fortune exceeding $1 trillion.
SpaceX, founded by Musk in 2002, acquired his artificial intelligence venture xAI in February in a deal that valued the combined company at $1.25 trillion, folding the Grok models, their data centers and the social network X into what is now the listed entity.
Musk owns an estimated 41% stake — worth roughly $890 billion on its own at Friday’s midday price, before counting his Tesla holdings and other ventures.
Musk’s fortune now exceeds the combined wealth of the next three names on the Bloomberg index — Google co-founders Larry Page and Sergey Brin, and Amazon’s Jeff Bezos — with second-ranked Page at roughly $304 billion, less than a third of Musk’s total, according to Bloomberg.
Musk became the first person worth $500 billion in October 2025 and the first past $600 billion in December, before the SpaceX listing compressed the climb from $600 billion to $1 trillion into roughly six months.
What It Means for Tesla
Tesla shares fell 2.2% to $390.53 by midday on Friday as the debut absorbed attention — and capital — across the growth complex, with the Nasdaq flat while the Dow rose 0.6%.
Tesla has generated around $890 million in revenue from SpaceX and xAI since 2023, Bloomberg reported last month, with SpaceX’s own filings disclosing the purchase of about $131 million worth of Cybertrucks last year.
Musk leads both companies, and a merger of the two has been expected by some analysts in 2027.
